Steve Rubel is moving to Edelman (from CooperKatz) and taking Micropersuasion with him.
According to Ad Age:
Rubel is taking a senior VP role at the much larger Edelman, where he’ll craft word-of-mouth and social-media campaigns for a consumer-client list that includes Unilever and Microsoft’s Xbox.
Edelman paid CooperKatz so Mr. Rubel could keep the name and URL. He won’t, however, be able to carry over the MicroPersuasion service offering he launched at CooperKatz. The parties wouldn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal.
It remains to be seen, however, how a big-agency environment will change MicroPersuasion. Edelman has a long list blue-chip clients that presumably wouldn’t be happy seeing their marketing and PR faux pas dissected on the blog. Asked about this, Mr. Rubel, whose blogging day begins at roughly 4:30 a.m., laughed and said, “I’m not going to be calling out as many companies as I used to.”
His new boss, Rick Murray, Edelman exec VP and general manager of its diversified services group, said, “We don’t intend to censor him. I don’t anticipate reviewing his posts in advance.” He said the Edelman Web site will link to MicroPersuasion.
Edelman recently has also hired Michael Krempasky, a public-affairs blogger, and Phil Gomes, who writes about online communications.
CooperKatz said it will rename its MicroPersuasion practice Cogence, a sort of acronym for “consumer-generated intelligence,” said principal Andy Cooper.
Public realtions executives are currently far ahead in race to put blogs to work for their clients. Let me give you an example from my own life. A little more than a year ago, a prominent ad agency in Chicago asked me to consider helping them start a PR practice. I was stunned, for I have zero experience in PR. The agency principal didn’t see it that way. He was looking at this blog, which was only three months old at the time, and thinking what I might be able to achieve for his clients. In the end, I did not get the offer, but the lesson remains.
Today, we’re 16 months into this project, and the idea of taking this blog and the nascent blogvertising practice behind it, to a firm on our wavelength is something we consider daily.
